


La Secadora

by imsfire



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Bodhi and Baze are cooking meanwhile, Caring, Cassian is showering, Cassian is very tired and sleepy, Childhood Memories, F/M, Feels and fluff, Jyn helps him, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Tenderness, and Jyn helps him get dry, getting dry after the 'fresher, post-Hoth pre-Endor, when he's too tired to think straight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-22 11:57:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15581463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: The Rogues have just completed a mission on a hot, dirty world and are lying low in a safe house - that happens to have a good hot water shower.





	La Secadora

It’s perfectly possible to go through a sonic with your clothes on; as they all discovered pretty quickly on Hoth, it’s even possible while fully dressed in winter coats and heavy boots, though it takes rather longer for the vibrations to get through every layer.  But for a water-based ‘fresher system there’s really no choice but to be naked.  It’s strip and shower, or no shower at all. 

And yes, on some missions that can mean getting pretty smelly, when you’re far from civilisation, or when time is short or conditions are unsafe.

But tonight Cassian has time, and access to facilities, and he’s safe.  The whole team are safe.  They’ve finished the mission, every parameter matched, even down to timescale and cost.  They’re in a safe house on the outskirts of one of the handful of small towns, awaiting daybreak before they go back to the ship.  And the water system has a vast roof tank and solar heating system.  Enough for everyone.  He takes care to be the last one in, to make sure everybody gets a good hot shower.

Hot water, hot glorious water, and mild-lathering liquid soap with a smell of leaves; a wet mat on the floor and a steamed-up window and mirror.  Hot water, hot clean water; it pours down, a blessing, a soaking, and the heat seeps into his muscles and bones, into the painful stiffness of his back, and Cassian is swaying on his feet with weariness as he washes himself.

He slathers the soap on and sluices it off, blinking down with hair dripping in his eyes.  Dirt slides off him, swirling into the drain, actual visible grey-brown dirt from the dusty fields, the dunes and grimy squatter camps where he’s been living for the last week.  The ache of muscles punished by long hours on his feet, by constant moving, always on watch, and short bursts of sleep crouched hidden in a culvert or a byre, each of the team taking their chance when they could, but seldom getting more than two or three hours at a time.  Running and searching, hiding and watching, in the cloudy dust and baking sun.  Desert worlds are hells!  Every one of them, hells. 

But they have their intel.  One night, just one more night here and then they’re off home. 

And this one night is spent in a real building, not in one of the surface miners’ tent-cities they’ve crept through.  They have a roof over them, a lockable door, a kitchen; and a properly equipped ‘fresher.

His spine hurts, all down the scar-site where careful skin grafts conceal the incisions from surgery and the titanium pins that keep him walking.  Tonight he can almost feel the pins, digging in, pegging each vertebra to its neighbour.  Flexing and grating as he stretches, raises his arms slowly, replaces the shower head on its hook.  Everything hurts. 

He’d like to stand here a while longer, just let the water fall on him, wipe everything away, wash out the thoughts and the struggle.  Fear and tension running away into the drain.  They got what they came here for and none of them got wounded or busted.  A whirlpool of relief, and he could so easily just slump down and let it swirl him away too. 

When he stops the water flow at last, gripping onto the lever with stiff, sore fingers that are now wonderfully and startlingly clean, even right under the nails ( _have I really spent that long in here? - o shit…)_ Cassian realises he can hear the Jedhans talking on the floor below.  They must be in the kitchen, it has a window directly beneath this one.  Yes - beneath the steady dripping of the ‘fresher head, there are the sounds of a knife chopping, pans clattering.  Bodhi and Baze cooking, by the sounds of it, and Chirrut? – backseat cooking. 

There’s a bird on the roof outside, too, singing an evening song.  Sparkling babbles of sound.  Bird, Chirrut, drips, Baze, the bird again, Chirrut laughing.  Bodhi chiding them both affectionately.  His team, his team, happy and alive. 

He leans on the tiles for a moment, wet and slippery against his hot forehead.  Get out, get dry, get dressed, it all seems a bit of a burden when he can just stay here, close his eyes and rest.  He hasn’t packed up, he’s still standing, but.  Out.  Dry.  Dressed.  It’s a lot.

_Out, Andor.  Get dry, get dressed, eat a meal like a civilised being._

When he’s fed then he can sleep.  When he’s fed then he can mend the universe and –

\- just rest a few minutes more. 

\- rest his head

\- wet tiles, comfortable, steam dissipating, the ache in his back dulling, dinner will wait a longer longer while will wait it can –

“Cassian?”

“Mmph? – Huh?”

“Cassian, are you there?”

Jyn’s voice.

“He’s in the refresher.  I observed him go in and he hasn’t come out.” K-2.

“I thought so.  Cassian, love, Bodhi’s making fried cheese and a pickled salad and Baze is baking. Pie.  Come on.  Food.  Food?  Cassian?”

“I’m here.” Its shamefully hard to fit the words together and get them out.  His tongue feels asleep.  He pushes the duraglass panel door open, lifts his feet out of the shower tray, steps down to add his wet footmarks to the pattern of everyone else’s already there on the mat.  Yawns. 

When he opens his eyes, Jyn is standing in the ‘fresher with him; behind her, K passes something into the room and then shuts the door.

“Cassian,” she says.  Gentle, reproving.  Affectionate. “You forgot your towel.”

Her own hair is still wet, still dripping down her neck.  A little spark in him would like to awaken into fire, would like to set him licking the cool water from her skin.  She’s unrolled her hair band and put it round her skull to draw the damp locks back off her forehead, but the short bits at the sides are escaping.  She’s beautiful.  Her face is clean and pink, her feet are clean and pale and she’s put on her clean shirt and pants.  Last time he saw her, her feet were filthy and she was covered all over with a film of grey-brown dust, skin, hair, clothes and all.  So beautiful so beautiful; but he’s so tired.

She grins at him and holds out the towel, letting it unfold and tumble, hanging from her hands.  It’s a big one, almost the size of a sheet.  Cassian smiles at her hopefully, stupidly, his arms too tired to reach for it.

“Did you get _any_ sleep last night?” she asks.  He analyses her tone, because.  Because.  She sounds concerned. 

They’d spent the previous night holed up in four separate spots; Chirrut and Baze in one hiding place together, Bodhi and K elsewhere, and she and Cassian both on their own.  He doubts she had any more rest than him.  But she’s had a shower and a chance to sit down while the others got cleaned up too.  While he got cleaned up and nearly fell asleep on his feet, in the wet shower cubicle.

When he doesn’t move, Jyn comes towards him, opens her arms, puts her head on one side.  Quizzical, checking in; then with a sweet embracing movement she wraps the towel round his entire body.  “Come here, my sleepy boy.”

“I am sleepy, yeah.” He frees one arm and begins dopily to wrestle with the fabric, trying to rub his shoulders.

“Let me.”

“Mmm?”

“Let me?” Jyn has him by the waist and she draws him a couple of steps to the side of the room.  To the battered wicker seat where he’s stacked his change of clothing.  She scoops up the shirt and pants and underwear, still neatly folded as they came out of his pack, and deposits them on the cistern.  Then steers him round and pushes him down into the chair. “Here.  Please.  Dear heart.  Sit down.  Let me.”

And she’s rubbing his feet dry, pressing the cloth between each toe, rubbing up the arch of one foot and around the ankle, and up again, over aching calf muscles.  Then the other side.  His bony feet and brown hairy shins, his knobbles of knees; Jyn’s hands gentle on the bruises, firm as she wipes the water away; the clean dry towel roughly comforting. 

She kneels up and rubs the tops of his thighs, and under his knees. 

“Shift yourself a bit?  I can’t do your top half if you’re still sitting on the towel.”

Obediently Cassian lifts himself up for a moment to free the section of fabric under his butt.  Jyn bunches it up and rubs briskly across his chest, under his arms, then over his shoulders.  She’s leaning forward into his lap; she looks up at him with a smile.

“Mission went ok, didn’t it?” she says.

“Yeah.  Went good.”

“I thought so.” She’s grinning, he’s almost falling over into her, his own grin creasing his face into one big happy rose of foolishness.  Until he yawns again.

Jyn starts to rub up and down his arms, brisk and gentle.

“This reminds me,” he tells her.  Another yawn. “When I was a kid.  If Papa dried me he played silly games.  He did magic tricks, like pretending he could make my toes vanish.  And when it was Mama, she would sing the drying song.”

“How did that go?” Jyn runs the towel between his fingers, then lift his right hand to her lips for a second before going to his left arm; up to the shoulder and on down, elbow, forearm, wrist, hand...

How did it go?  He hasn’t heard it in more than twenty years yet as soon as summoned, there it is.  “It went: Secadora, secadora, frotate-frotate-frotate-frop!  Secadora, secadora, frotate-frotate-frotate-frop!” Even the tune comes back, such as it is.  Two notes. “Secadora, secadora, frotate-frotate-frotate-frop!”

“Secadora is – the one who dries?  The lady-drier?  That sounds wrong, sorry!”

“Drying machine.  It’s, like, to say, _Drying machine, drying machine, rub-a-me, rub-a-me, rub-a-me, rop!_ I’m sorry, I’m half asleep.  I do know that sounds weird.”

“It sounds sweet.” She’s holding both his hands in the towel, kneeling at his feet, looking up at him. “Did she just go on with that one little song, all the way till she had you dry?”

“Sometimes she would play that the fuel cell began to run low.  So then it would be frotate-frotate-frootaaate-e-e-fro-o-o-o-uh-uh-uh.  And I would have to recharge the fuel supply.”

“And how did you do that?”

“How do you think?” He leans down and kisses her. “Apparently you get one minute of fuel for a kiss.”

There’s a very pleasant smell of something baking, wafting up from the kitchen below, and he can hear Chirrut and K-2 apparently failing to get a rise out of one another while Bodhi laughs.

Jyn folds the damp towel in half and starts to dry his hair roughly.  Her own is still damp.  She presses his hands up onto the towel for him to take over and gets to her feet again; hands him his clothes as he stands too.  Sleepily he is managing to towel his hair, though he isn’t sure how much of an effort he’s putting into it.

He feels markedly more awake, anyway.  He drapes the cloth over the edge of the basin to free his hands, and pulls on the underpants, trousers, soft sand-coloured shirt.  Takes up the cloth and rubs again at his hair lazily. “I feel human again.”

“You do look better for a wash.”

“And - did you say pie and fried cheese?”

“And salad pickles, yeah.  And K said he’d take the night watch.  So we can all catch up on some proper sleep.”

“I love you,” Cassian says, turning back his cuffs.  It’s too hot for long sleeves but it’s the only spare shirt he brought; and it is good to be clean and dry and dressed.  And about to eat. “I love all of you so much.  Especially you.”

“Love you too.” She’s almost out the door, looking back, smiling.  He says “Frotate-frotate-frootaaate-e-e-fro-o-o-o-uh-uh-uh” and holds out his arms.  Jyn stops.  Gives him the eyebrow.  Serves him right for teaching her that look.  But she’s still grinning, waiting to see what he’s playing for, and he says “Just one more little bit of power for the fuel cell?” with his best hopeful sleepy smile.

She comes forward and takes him in her arms, and kisses him awake.  


End file.
